No developer likes to see their game crash. Any bug can be fixed in time, but that becomes complicated when the publisher applies a brutal certification process. Sega was particularly diabolical with titles for the Mega Drive console, but programmer Jon Burton took a very creative shortcut: turning bugs into 'hidden cheats' that gave extra lives or allowed level skipping.
The best way to access the secret menu in the classic Sonic 3D Blast for Sega Mega Drive is... hitting the cartridge. That's right: just as players shake a pinball machine and edge toward the 'tilt' hoping to change the ball's direction, the key was to give the cartridge a good tap. It works in almost all cases, and judging by the quality of the menu, it seems legitimate. But is it really 'is' legitimate? Well... yes and no. 'Yes' because that section was designed by its programmer Jon Burton, and 'no' because he never planned for it to manifest that way.
The story begins with the certification methods that console makers used on their upcoming games. The full process took several weeks, and if any error appeared along the way, developers had to fix the problem, go back to square one, and restart certification. While working on the Mega Drive version of the classic Mickey Mania (1994), Burton decided to write a series of messages that the game would display if it encountered a bug. At first, that helped him identify issues more quickly, but before sending the game for validation, he modified the system so that instead of showing an error on screen, it would activate a 'secret time warp', making the player advance or go back a level while the game kept running.
This technique worked so well for Burton and his company Traveller's Tales that he applied it again in Toy Story (1995), and took it a step further in Sonic 3D Blast (1996), redirecting the most critical interruptions (in case something was forgotten) to a level selection screen. Several years later, Burton started seeing YouTube videos of people who had apparently discovered a super-secret menu by hitting the game cartridge. In reality, all they are doing is inducing an error through movement.
